Post from Truth Social

A Senate endorsement built as a crime indictment

The post spends roughly four-fifths of its length prosecuting Roy Cooper and one-fifth endorsing Michael Whatley. The endorsement comes last, in all caps, after a chain of numbers ("83 murderers," "51 of these prisoners serving life sentences," "25 murders"), a named victim, a named defendant, and a 1988 precedent. The case for Whatley rests almost entirely on Cooper's alleged guilt. The only positive claim made for Whatley is about his party career ("Head of the Republican Party of North Carolina, and then the Head of the United States Republican Party"), and it is padded with the label "unprecedented Victories." He gets no policy or personal qualities. The candidate he backs is defined by who he is running against.

On the same afternoon the feed also thanked Karoline Leavitt, named her successor, and promoted the next day's Youngstown rally. Read beside those, this post belongs to the campaign-season run of endorsements. Nothing Cooper said or did that day appears to have set it off. The opening "I have just learned" presents briefing material as a fresh discovery, which gives the attack the feel of a spontaneous reaction.

Who wrote it: a briefing in Trump's voice

The timestamp converts to about 7:54 PM Eastern on a Sunday. The next day's Ohio rally places him in the Eastern zone whether he was in Washington or Bedminster. That is early evening, between the business-hours and late-night windows.

The text reads like two sources stitched together. The statistics (83, 51, 25), the full name "DeCarlos Brown, Jr.," and the correct spelling "Iryna Zarutska" match Republican opposition material and the NCGOP and Senate Leadership Fund ad campaigns. That suggests a staff memo or a dictated summary of one. The connective tissue reads as Trump's own speech: "believe it or not," "for all to see," the verbless exclamation "So devastating for the reputation of North Carolina!", "He is a TOTAL FRAUD!", and the caps formula "COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT... AND WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" The fixation on reputation also points to him. The word appears three times ("Roy Cooper's reputation will never be the same," "devastating for the reputation of North Carolina," and "DISGRACED North Carolina"). That frames a mass-release dispute as a matter of standing and shame. The Horton digression, with its aside that Dukakis "had an insurmountable lead," is the kind of political-history riff Trump tells at rallies. The most likely reading is a staff-assembled factual core that Trump dictated over or revised.

Splitting into the disgraced and the faithful

The post arranges its people into two fixed camps. Cooper is "Radical Left," a "TOTAL FRAUD," and someone who "DISGRACED North Carolina, and disqualified himself from Public Office." Whatley "is the man for the job" and "WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN." Neither figure gets any nuance. The devaluation goes as far as eligibility: "disqualified himself from Public Office" is a moral verdict that skips the voters the post is addressing.

The narrative is a contamination arc told about someone else. A state's "reputation," once intact, is spoiled by one man's act and can only be restored by electing the endorsed candidate. Trump stays offstage as narrator and kingmaker. His self-reference is limited to the signature and "MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT," which treats his backing as the deciding credential. The archetype is the King conferring legitimacy, with Cooper as the Shadow figure who let chaos in ("put on the streets"). The order-restorer framing is explicit: disorder comes from one official's leniency, and a vote fixes it.

The affect is contempt rather than rage. The hostile terms come in bursts ("TOTAL FRAUD," "DISGRACED") and then return to narrative prose. Nothing in the text suggests Trump is personally wounded. The post shows assertive, low-agreeableness extraversion: dominance through denunciation. It uses the victim's suffering as evidence ("violently slashed Iryna from behind... while she was innocently sitting on a train") without any expressed sympathy for her or her family. Her death serves the argument against Cooper.

The Willie Horton template and the facts it bends

Invoking Willie Horton is the post's most consequential choice. The 1988 Horton ads are the textbook example of a racially coded crime appeal. Here the template is laid over a case that was already racially charged in 2025, a Black defendant and a white Ukrainian refugee victim, and the post tells readers to see the two as the same story ("worse than... Dukakis... releasing the infamous Willie Horton"). It works through appeal to fear and guilt by analogy. The claim "This terrible decision by Dukakis... led to his resounding and conclusive defeat" also carries a forecast: Cooper will lose the way Dukakis did.

The factual claims bend in a consistent direction:

• Brown's release. The post says Brown was "put on the streets through release by Cooper." Fact-checkers found that Brown finished his full sentence and left prison in September 2020, five months before the February 2021 settlement. His name appears on the settlement list only because the state counted some cases retroactively.
• Who released the prisoners. "Let out 83 murderers" makes a court settlement of an NAACP/ACLU pandemic lawsuit sound like Cooper's personal choice. Reporting supports the 51 life-sentence figure, with the caveat that those prisoners were already parole-eligible. No source located supports the figure of 83.
• Horton. The post says Horton got "a release and pardon" and went on to "murder again." Horton was on a weekend furlough, not pardoned. His Maryland crimes were assault, armed robbery and rape, not murder.

The direction of every change is the same: discretion moves onto Cooper, and the severity of the crimes goes up. That pattern fits motivated distortion better than memory failure. The Horton errors do echo a common popular retelling, and they are the one place where a confabulation reading is open (see markers). The reversal works by recasting an official who opposed early releases during the pandemic as the man who released killers, and it supplies the "TOTAL FRAUD" label to close the question.

The language does not dehumanize, and the action it asks for is a vote: "NORTH CAROLINA, VOTE FOR MICHAEL WHATLEY." The target is a candidate for office, not a group, and nothing in the text implies anyone should act outside the ballot. What deserves attention is the racialized crime-fear template, not any call to violence.

Language production

The 300-word narrative stays coherent. It moves from accusation to case example to historical parallel to endorsement without losing the thread, and the sentences are long but correctly built. The only lexical slip is the redundant "prisons and penitentiaries." The Horton inaccuracies are the single item that could be read as confabulation. Because they repeat a widespread political retelling, they are weak evidence on their own. Checking them against Trump's earlier Horton references would settle whether this is a long-held version or a recent drift.

Sources: FactCheck.org, Fact check: life sentences in NC's 2021 release deal, The Assembly, PolitiFact, MBFC daily fact checks 02/11/2026, WECT

Fact Verification

What the tracking actually shows: the most-cited figure comes from a New York Post analysis of May 7, 2026, which found 18 released people charged (not convicted) with killing someone over the more than four years since 2021. CooperReleasedHim.com is a database built by independent journalist Stephen Horn from the 4,234-name release list. Horn said 14 had been convicted of murder since release (North State Journal, May 6, 2026). WRAL, The Assembly, the Cooper campaign FAQ and the NRSC-reposted Center Square story all still used 18 into September 2026. No later tally reaching 25 turned up before the post date. A Center Square story of July 20, 2026 mentioned 24 "charged in homicide-related offenses" among the more than 700 releases beyond the 3,500. The surrounding text suggests those were the charges that originally sent them to prison, not new killings.

Whether the settlement freed them: WRAL reviewed court and prison records for the 18 accused killers. Most were either out of prison before the Feb. 25, 2021 settlement was signed, or would have been out anyway because their sentences were ending or they were up for parole. The Assembly (July 27, 2026) found at least seven of the 18 were already out before the settlement. It identified only one man, Locklear, who killed someone during time he would otherwise still have been in prison. PolitiFact and FactCheck.org reached the same conclusion, and FactCheck.org found one anti-Cooper ad tied him to a killing by a man released from a South Carolina prison.

Timing: "immediately after being released" is wrong for nearly every case. The 18 charges are spread over about four years. Locklear's killing, about three to four weeks after his release in May 2021, is the one documented quick case. The post's own example, DeCarlos Brown Jr., left prison in September 2020 after serving his full sentence and is accused of a killing in August 2025, nearly five years later.

Who "they" are: the post says the 83 murderers and 51 lifers committed the 25 murders. Horn's database counts 70 people with murder convictions among those released, of whom only 9 reoffended in any way, and 53 lifers, of whom 1 reoffended. That leaves no room for that group to account for 25 murders.

Verdict: there is a kernel of truth, since some people on the release list were later charged with, and in at least 14 cases convicted of, murder. But the count of 25 is unsupported (the documented number is 18 charges), "immediately" misstates the timing, and the post pins the killings on a group whose recorded reoffense rate is very low. Most of the documented killings also cannot be attributed to the settlement at all. | | "The reason for releasing them was that Cooper didn't want them to catch COVID in prison" | Half True | The releases were COVID-related, but they came out of a court-approved settlement of a civil-rights lawsuit. Cooper declined calls to commute sentences during the pandemic, so describing it as his personal motive misstates the decision. | | "DeCarlos Brown Jr. was put on the streets through release by Cooper" | False | PolitiFact and other fact-checks found that Brown served his full sentence and left prison on Sept. 20, 2020, five months before the February 2021 settlement. He appears on the settlement list only because the state counted certain cases retroactively. | | "Brown slashed Iryna Zarutska from behind while she sat on a train, captured on security film" | Mostly True | Surveillance video released in 2025 shows Zarutska stabbed from behind while seated on a Charlotte light-rail car in August 2025. Brown was charged in the killing. The post calls him 'the infamous murderer,' which presents him as convicted. | | "Dukakis released Willie Horton, previously convicted of murder, who went on to kidnap, rape, and murder again after a release and pardon" | Mostly False | Horton, serving life for murder, did not return from a weekend furlough under a Massachusetts program that predated Dukakis and that Dukakis defended. He was never pardoned. In Maryland he assaulted and bound a man and raped the man's fiancée. He did not commit another murder. | | "Dukakis had an insurmountable lead in 1988 and the Horton decision led to his defeat" | Half True | Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by about 17 points in summer 1988 polling, and the Horton furlough attacks are widely credited as a factor in his decline. The lead was not insurmountable, and historians cite several other causes of the loss. | | "Whatley headed the North Carolina GOP and then the national Republican Party, both unprecedented victories" | Half True | Whatley chaired the North Carolina Republican Party and then the Republican National Committee. The move from state chair to RNC chair has precedent: Reince Priebus went from Wisconsin GOP chair to RNC chair. |

Overall Veracity: 41%